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RedState’s Erickson Stands By Assertion That Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize Was An ‘Affirmative Action’ Award

When it was announced last year that President Obama had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, RedState editor Erick Erickson tweeted that Obama only won the award because “the Nobel Committee had affirmative action quotas it had to meet.” During an appearance on the Colbert Report last night, Stephen Colbert asked Erickson if he would “be willing to repeat” some of his controversial tweets with his “face on camera.” Erickson said he would be willing to repeat his Nobel/affirmative action claim:

COLBERT: Now, speaking of standing on the issues, I, I am proud of some of the things I’ve said on this show. For instance, I said that Rosa Parks was overrated. Ok. I thought that was bold and I stand by it. She broke the law. But you sir, have put me to shame. You have twittered the following things. You said of Justice Souter that he was “a goat f#$king child molester.” You said that Linda Douglass, the White House health care spokesperson, was the “Joseph Goebbels of health care.” And you said of Nobel Prize winner Barack Obama, “I did not realize the Nobel Committee had affirmative action quotas.” Now…

ERICKSON: Yeah.

COLBERT: All of those things, all of those things, I think are refreshingly bold.

ERICKSON: Not exactly.

COLBERT: Ok, would you be willing to repeat any of those with your face on camera?

ERICKSON: The last two, yeah. The first one was not my finest moment.

Watch it:

Erickson defended his comparison of Linda Douglass to Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels by claiming that Douglass had been “referring to those people who were opposed to health care as being brownshirts.” “I figured if she was going to refer to people who didn’t like the government taking over health care as brownshirts then maybe I would refer to her as Joseph Goebbels,” said Erickson. Mediaite’s Tommy Christopher writes that he “wasn’t able to find any record of Douglass having made such a remark.”

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In his tweet and blog post referring to Douglass as Goebbels, Erickson didn’t link to his phantom example of Douglass calling health reform opponents “brownshirts.” Instead, he linked to a Fox News-hosted AP article in which Douglass criticized a misleading insurance industry attack on health care reform. Though Erickson now claims he was simply mocking liberal use of the word “brownshirts,” he himself has referred to liberals as “brownshirts.”